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Find your kind of college.

Explore 6,418 school profiles by academic direction, campus life, and student experience. Set your preferences or start with a school you know.

Model-generated profiles for exploration. How to read the ratings

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Set your preferences

Turn on the traits that matter to you, then adjust their sliders. Leave the others off. Zero represents the average school.

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Academic direction

How selective and widely known the school is.

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From −4, Open access, to +4, Highly selective. Zero is the average school.

How many students go on to graduate or professional school.

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From −4, Rarely, to +4, Often. Zero is the average school.

How much the school is geared toward jobs and earnings after graduation.

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From −4, Less career-focused, to +4, Career-focused. Zero is the average school.
Campus life

How large the student body is.

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From −4, Small, to +4, Large. Zero is the average school.

From rural campuses to the heart of a big city.

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From −4, Rural, to +4, Big city. Zero is the average school.

Sports, Greek life, dorms, and a classic campus feel.

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From −4, Nontraditional, to +4, Classic campus. Zero is the average school.

How central parties and nightlife are to student life.

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From −4, Quiet, to +4, Big party scene. Zero is the average school.

Artists, activists, free spirits, and countercultural students.

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From −4, Conventional, to +4, Bohemian. Zero is the average school.
Student experience

How ambitious and competitive the students are.

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From −4, Laid-back, to +4, Intense. Zero is the average school.

How many students come from low-income or otherwise disadvantaged backgrounds.

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From −4, Few, to +4, Many. Zero is the average school.

Start with a school

Add up to ten schools you like. CollegeDive finds other schools with similar rating profiles.

Start typing a name, nickname, or initials ("penn state", "ucla") and pick from the list, or press Enter to add a name as typed.

About the ratings

What CollegeDive compares, and how to read your results.

What the dimensions describe

The 6,418 school profiles are based on model-generated ratings of campus life, students, and academic direction. A psychometric model summarizes those ratings into 10 dimensions. The sliders use a −4 to +4 scale, with zero representing the average school in this dataset.

Two ways to compare

Set your preferences ranks schools by how close they are to the targets you set, using only the dimensions you switch on. Start with a school uses correlations between full rating profiles to find similar schools. You can add a location and radius to either search.

What does the profile-similarity score mean?

It is the profile distance rescaled to 0–100: 100 indicates identical values on the dimensions being compared. Specifically, it is 100 × (1 − RMSD / 8), limited to 0–100 and rounded. It is not a validated probability of admission, satisfaction, or success. Some results use the underlying correlation ranking without displaying this score.

Use the profiles to find schools to investigate. Check current programs, costs, and admission requirements directly with each school.

Working with the data? Explore the MooreMetrics API.